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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • Moving to another country, especially when the native language is not English, that’s a massive challenge. It’s important that you’re going there for a positive reason. Otherwise you could have chosen anywhere, right? So your motivation to be a community member there would be low. So don’t just run away from Musk. Find other goals and reasons to aim for Italy.

    Also, every country and city has some assholes loving in it. Not everyone is very kind. That’s life.






  • I don’t think postmodernism had much to do with it. Go ask your average MAGA racist if they even know what that term means and they’ll shrug their shoulders. Similarly, the research does not show that your echo chamber theory holds water, and in fact it suggests the opposite. In the days before the world wide web, people were actually stuck in echo chambers, that being the communities where they lived.





  • They’re talking about avoiding legal liability, not about actually doing the right thing. And of course you can see how it would help them avoid legal liability. The lawyers will walk into court and honestly say that at the time of the accident the human driver was in control of the vehicle.

    And then that creates a discussion about how much time the human driver has to have in order to actually solve the problem, or gray areas about who exactly controls what when, and it complicates the situation enough where maybe Tesla can pay less money for the deaths that they are obviously responsible for.


  • First of all, they won’t arrest everyone. Even extreme governments on the tail end of their horrible leadership don’t arrest everyone. They need some citizens to be there working jobs. Rather, they would aim to arrest enough people to scare everyone else and then some other people randomly just for the hell of it.

    But if you think staying under the radar is going to make your life better, maybe you should read some history books. Who do you think is coming to save you? Who do you think is coming to make your community better? When do you think they’re going to arrive? Outside forces will not fix contemporary US political problems. It doesn’t work that way, not when everyone has armies and nuclear weapons.

    Sadly, quite possibly things could get far worse before they get better, so if you want to plan for some unfortunate eventualities, that might be a reasonable decision. But don’t think for a second you can run from them. And even if you could, what kind of human would that make you? What kind of person do you want to be?





  • No. You didn’t define either word. Probably they didn’t either. They want to equivocate – switch definitions of words without saying so – and this is classic sophistry.

    Anyway, freedom alone is hard to define. What happens if your freedom (to punch people) and mine (not to be punched) conflict? Who wins? … So you can’t actually have 100% general freedom. But if you have a narrower definition, maybe you can say something constructive.

    And crypto is all about theft. So let’s focus in that. If I send you money accidentally, because you tricked me, BitCoin has no robust refund procedure. So … you could say it is more free than a credit card (no credit card companies or banks in the middle), but the specific freedom is “freedom for fraudsters to steal more efficiently”. Is that what you as a small-time investor want? Did the lecturer spell that out to you? … I bet they didn’t.




  • I was reading an interesting article the other day about how after World War II people were obviously opposed to populism, and by the '80s and certainly the '90s people that were born after the war had lost the awareness of the danger that hero worship creates.

    At the same time, many organizations including government organizations had failed to update themselves over the years, so people romanticized the idea of someone walking in and magically making the correct snap judgments that would remedy the situation. This was so pervasive in the business world I think in part because it allowed corporate executives to justify f****** over ordinary employees. If the company makes or breaks because of one person at the top, who cares if you’re paying people minimum wage and they can’t even afford to pay for dental care or a car.

    What amazed me is how long that vision of Steve Jobs stuck around. Even in recent years people have been praising him, but if you think of the value in his company, it’s mostly a load of s***. Those phones and computers are incredibly overpriced, and they have so many bad aspects, especially lock-in, which most people intuitively understand these days. And still we have Apple addicts.